The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  Iry could leave then; should have left long since. But now she had come this far, she could not go. Huy was so glad to see her, so transparently happy, that she lingered. She had a sip or two of beer from the jar. She heard one of his stories. He did not ask her to tell him one in return, asked nothing of what she had been or done. He was simply content that she was there, in that hour, keeping him company.

  When Kemni came back, he was much altered, and much for the better. He was clean, shaved, and visibly content. Iry was a little startled then, to realize that he was good to look at. Rather more than good, if truth were told. He had been pleasant enough as a boy. The man had beauty, and no little share of it, either.

  Surely he knew it. Equally surely, he did not let it go to his head. He sat where Pepi showed him, took the cup he was given, and tore into the loaf of barley bread with controlled ferocity. As strong as he was under the lingering marks of wind and weather, he had not been on short commons for long; but he must have eaten poorly for the past day or two or three.

  When he had eaten a third of the loaf and drunk half the cup of beer—wise man; he knew not to gorge a starving stomach—he sat back and belched politely, and said, “Ah. Now I feel a proper man again.”

  “You do look it,” Iry said. “Now tell me true. You really are gathering forces for a rebellion?”

  He glanced at the two old men. Huy sat in his wonted blind serenity. Pepi was deep in a fresh jar of beer. Iry knew better than to underestimate either of them, but they did look vastly harmless.

  Kemni tilted his head a fraction. He said, “Swear for all of you, cousin. Swear that you will say nothing of this to any Retenu.”

  Iry’s brows rose. So: he was not such a fool as he seemed. “No Retenu will know of this,” she said.

  “Good,” said Kemni. He paused. Then he said, “I’m not raising rebellion yet. But I’m testing the waters.”

  “And what are you finding?” she asked.

  “Discontent,” he answered. “Anger. A great deal of laziness and no little cowardice; but people would be glad to be free of the conqueror.”

  “Even the laborers in the fields?”

  “They say,” he said, “that one king is as bad as another, but if they must have one, they prefer one who doesn’t pasture his blasted donkeys in their best barley fields.”

  Pepi snorted, coughed and choked on a mouthful of beer. While Huy pounded his back, Iry said, “It’s horses here. This lord is a horseman.”

  “So I’d heard,” Kemni said. “He’s not as badly disliked as most. Because he’s new, I suppose. And soft.”

  Iry agreed that Khayan could be perceived as a soft man. He had put no one to death yet, nor hung anyone from a hook to feed the vultures. But she did not make the mistake of thinking him weak. “He’s strong enough,” she said.

  “You know him, then,” said Kemni.

  Pepi looked as if he would say something to that, but Iry’s glance silenced him. “Everybody knows the lord in this house.”

  “And you?” said Kemni. “What are you to him? Has he—”

  “He’s never laid a hand on me,” Iry said. And that was true; and she surprised herself by almost—almost—minding it. “He has women of his own, and he seems content with them. His mother comes from a tribe far to the east, a tribe of warriors who are women, and who ride horses. He grew up among them. He’d never touch a woman against her will.”

  “Even a slave?”

  “Any woman,” Iry said. “Women are holy. Men are born to serve them. That’s the law he learned at his mother’s breast.”

  “Astonishing,” Kemni said as if to himself. “And the horses—has he many?”

  “Hundreds,” Pepi said before Iry could answer that. “You can be a stable-lad if you like, and if your stomach will stand it. Then you’ll get your fill of them.”

  That was a little presumptuous, but Pepi did not seem to care. Nor did Kemni. His eyes had lit. So, Iry thought: he found horses irresistible, too. “I doubt anything could sate me, there,” he said. “Yes, that would do. That would do very well indeed. Or will I be the only Egyptian who dares do such a thing?”

  “There are a few of us,” Pepi said. “One more won’t be too noticeable.”

  “Pepi has been master of the stables here,” Huy said in the sweet, vague way he could affect when it suited him. “The new lord brought his own man to do that, but as with the lord’s cook, he found other occupation.”

  “Truly?” Kemni laughed, a little incredulously perhaps, but in admiration, too.

  “Truly,” said Huy. “We’re all rebels here, though the Retenu think they rule us.”

  “How marvelous,” Kemni said. “How strangely wonderful.”

  Pepi shrugged. “It’s the way we do it here. Why, did you think we’d tamely submit?”

  “Most people have,” said Kemni.

  “Ah,” said Pepi. “Well. They can’t help it, I suppose. But this is the Sun Ascendant.” He said it as if that answered everything. No doubt it did.

  Kemni sprang up. “Take me, then. Take me to see the horses.”

  Pepi might have liked to linger over his second jar of beer, but Iry caught his eye. He sighed and consented. Kemni did not seem to notice. He was wonderfully eager.

  After Pepi had taken him away, Iry sat with Huy for a little while in silence. Then Huy said, “You didn’t tell him.”

  “There wasn’t time.”

  Huy shrugged, and sighed as Pepi had. “He’ll find out. I don’t suppose he’ll be very angry.”

  “Does it matter if he is?” Iry demanded.

  “Probably not,” said Huy. “He’s not the lord here, nor ever was. But what you are, what the Retenu have made you . . . that might give him pause to think.”

  “I am still myself,” she said. “I am still of the Two Lands. Nothing will ever change that.”

  “I know, child,” Huy said in his gentle old voice. “I do know that. But—”

  “Dear old friend,” Iry said. She bent over him and kissed his brow. “I’ll talk to him again. I promise. Will that make you happy?”

  “It doesn’t matter if I’m happy,” said Huy. “Now go, child. They must be hunting high and low for you.”

  “I’m sure they are,” she said. She was deeply reluctant to go, to leave this place that had been a sanctuary since she was small. But she could not stay. She kissed him again, patted his dry old hand, and left him in his private darkness, with his dreams and his stories, and his soul that saw so clearly and so well.

  IV

  Kemni had not intended to linger in the Sun Ascendant. It had been his plan to creep in, discover what he could discover, then withdraw before anyone knew he was there, and make his way to Avaris where Iphikleia had gone to confer with her own people.

  But when the gods brought him over the wall at his cousin’s feet, some god or spirit had possessed him. To find her alive and so well, unharmed, and so evidently free of the house, struck him strangely. Then to learn that the master of horse here was not only an Egyptian but Pepi, his old friend and sometime ally—it seemed like the hand of a god.

  This was not at all as he had expected to find a holding under the conqueror’s heel. The house was crawling with Retenu, yes. They stalked about in their robes and their arrogance, fancying that they ruled the world. But they did not rule this house. The kitchens, the stables, the servants’ quarters—every one looked to an Egyptian. Even the steward of the estate was the same as he had always been, Teti with his broad shoulders and his brusque manner. His wife Tawit, his daughters the five Beauties—all much the same as Kemni remembered.

  Not that Kemni made himself known to them. He had risked enough with Iry and Pepi and the scribe Huy, now sadly blind and terribly aged, but as keen of wit as ever. The stable-lads did not seem to know him. They were content to be told that here was a young kinsman of Pepi’s, come in from Memphis after some infraction that no one quite referred to, keeping his head low and doing as he was told, and waiting t
ill it was safe to go home again.

  That was true, or as true as it needed to be. The fabric of his fancied life, like one of Huy’s stories, spun itself more intricately, and bound him more tightly, with each hour that he spent in that house. When hours stretched to days, Kemni found that he could not tear himself free. There were things that people were not telling him. Glances exchanged, conversations broken off. He had to know—he had to be certain of what went on here, before he could go away.

  At least one of the things that people whispered of had to do with the Lady Nefertem. That he determined soon enough. She had been ruling in the women’s house, and had not permitted the lord’s women to live there—not permitted it, as if she had never yielded her rank even to the conqueror. But something had happened. The new lord, the man whom Kemni had foolishly called soft on first hearing of him, had sent her to his mother. And that one, that lady from beyond the eastern horizon, was no soft creature at all.

  “She’s greater than a queen,” Pepi said that first night, as they shared yet another jar of beer, a loaf and a basket of onions, in the scent of horses and cut fodder. Pepi lived and slept in the stable, as one would expect. Kemni his supposed kinsman would share those lodgings, nigh under the feet of the lord’s horses.

  Pepi went on to speak of the lord’s mother. “She has great power. She’s a sorceress, they say. For certain she rules like a king, and commands men. The Retenu are terrified of her.”

  “And the Lady Nefertem?” Kemni asked. “Has she been harmed?”

  “Oh, no,” Pepi said. “Not she. But the lord thought to pull her claws, making her his mother’s servant. Since, you see, he couldn’t make her his concubine.”

  “He couldn’t?” Kemni wanted to laugh, but he doubted Pepi would approve of that. He well remembered his aunt, his mother’s sister—her striking beauty, which his mother had had in lesser degree; her air of queenly distraction, and her startlingly strong will. She seemed as empty-headed as she was beautiful, but she was not that at all. Not in the slightest. It was an artifice, like the paint that could not heighten, only illumine her beauty.

  “Well,” said Pepi, “no, he couldn’t take her if she didn’t want him, which is a point of honor with the tribe his mother comes from. But they say she tried to rule him, and that he wouldn’t have. So he gave her to his mother. The women’s house was in an uproar for days. If you want your rebellion, lad, there’s the start of it. They’d happily rise up and strike the lord down, for taking their lady away from them.”

  “A rebellion of women,” Kemni said. “Now that would be a marvel for the world to exclaim at.”

  “Don’t laugh,” Pepi said. “Those ladies are angry. And the Lady Nefertem . . .” He paused as if to seek the words that would serve him best. “The Lady Nefertem is someone you should talk to. But how to do it, now she’s held captive—let me think. Let me think.”

  Pepi subsided into his beer and his thoughts, nor did he emerge that night. Kemni went to sleep while Pepi was still pondering, slept deeper than he had ever intended, and woke to the morning tumult of horses being brought out, harnessed, prepared for the day’s work. When he had roused fully and come out, he understood that the lord had gone as he did every morning, on some errand that duty laid on him. And Kemni had ground to recover: these good servants took a dim view of a newcomer who lay abed till full morning. Small wonder, they muttered, that he had been driven out of his former service, if he was so monstrously lazy.

  Kemni found himself compelled to prove the accusation false. He had never labored as he labored here, hard and backbreaking work, and no end to it, either. By sundown he was ready to fall headlong into his bed of hay.

  ~~~

  But Pepi was waiting for him. “Come with me,” the old man said.

  Kemni suppressed a groan. He was allowed a bit of bread and a sip of beer, but the rest he had to put aside for later. This was no summons that he could refuse, and truly, except for exhaustion, he should not want to.

  He had known the house well when he was young. Some parts of it had changed. There was a new house where one of the old gardens had been, a house that was, he had discovered during the day, built by the first foreign lord for his women, because the Lady Nefertem would not let them past the gate of the house that she ruled.

  That house was quiet tonight, its women nowhere in evidence, though the halls and courts were clearly still inhabited: lamps were burning, and there were wafts of unguents. Through a door that was ajar, he saw a drift of veil abandoned on a chair.

  Pepi led him deep within, to a courtyard open to the flowering of stars. The trees planted in it were sweet with blossom. The pool in its center was home to bright fish: one leaped as he paused to get his bearings.

  Two figures waited by the pool. One stood, looming vast and dark: a Nubian, a shadow on shadow, save for eyes that gleamed upon him. He dared hazard a guess as to who that might be. “Nefer-Ptah,” he said.

  The Nubian inclined her head. “Young lord,” she said in her deep sweet voice.

  The other, she who sat in silence, was smaller, much smaller, yet regal and erect. The lamp that Pepi had brought to guide them through the dark corridors, set on the pool’s rim, cast a faint and flickering light on a face that had changed not at all in the years since Kemni marched away. He had seen beauty in plenty, seen queens and royal concubines, great ladies and great courtesans, and beauties of lesser rank across the Two Lands and on the island of Crete. And yet, beside this, even Queen Nefertari, even Ariana of Crete, paled to a shadow.

  It was beauty almost too much to bear, as if she had been a goddess and not a mortal woman. He knelt in front of it, the better to look into her eyes, but in homage, too.

  She never smiled. It would have marred that beauty. But her eyes were warm, resting on him.

  “Why, child,” Nefer-Ptah said above their heads. “You look just like her.”

  Kemni started, and flushed. Was that laughter in the Lady Nefertem’s eyes?

  Her finger brushed his cheek. “You are lovely,” she said. “Do the ladies love you, away in the Upper Kingdom?”

  He did not know where to look. She tilted his chin up, so that he had to meet her eyes again. “There, child. We’ve embarrassed you. We are glad to see you—heart-glad. We had thought you lost long since amid the Field of Flowers.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have sent word.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But that’s done. Now tell me. What news do you bring? Will there be war?”

  “Soon,” he said. “We have allies on the sea: Crete will come when it’s time, and sweep the enemy up the river as we sweep down it. But we need help. Can the people of this kingdom fight for us? Will they?”

  “Crete?” she said, as if she had heard only that. “Crete will fight for us?”

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “For gold,” he said, “and for spices. And for a royal marriage.”

  “Of course,” she said. “And yet—of all they hope to gain, is it worth what they may lose?”

  “They think so,” Kemni said. “It gives them great wealth, and the freedom of Egypt. And makes one of their princesses a queen.”

  “The queen you serve.”

  “Yes. She’s brought us horses and chariots. She’s given us the enemy’s weapon.”

  “That’s a great gift,” said the Lady Nefertem.

  He nodded. “That’s why I came here. I heard that there were horses.”

  “You’re not going to steal them.”

  “No,” he said. “But when the war is over—I want them.”

  “That would be a great prize,” she said.

  “And a great defense against conquest hereafter.” He sat on his heels, comfortable now, if not precisely at ease. “But first, we have to win the war.”

  “Yes.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I am trammeled here, as I am. But what I can do, I will do. When the armies of the Great House come to the Sun Ascendant, the people wi
ll be ready.”

  “And other holdings round about? Will they be ready as well?”

  “If they can be,” she said.

  He bowed his head as to a queen. “That will please the Great House.”

  “And you?”

  “Very much,” he said.

  “Good,” said the Lady Nefertem.

  ~~~

  Kemni could leave then. He had done what he came to do. But he stayed: first because he had no wish to travel at night. Then, in the morning, the order came in to the stable: that the horses and asses be readied, and the chariots, and the great ungainly thing that the Retenu called a wagon, in which the lord’s mother and certain of her women would travel. For they were going, the lord’s man said, to Avaris, to answer the king’s summons.

  Kemni needed to be in Avaris. How simple then, and how gods-given a gift, to go as one of a foreign lord’s following. Someone after all must look after the horses.

  As he set to work among the horses, another of the grooms brought out the lord’s pair of dun stallions. They had been gone the morning before—on the lord’s errand, whatever that was. Kemni, curious, found occasion to be in the courtyard as the lord came out.

  That was the first Kemni had seen of Khayan, lord and conqueror of the Sun Ascendant. He was Retenu, no more or less: big, bearded man in the leather tunic that they wore for riding in chariots. Kemni could see nothing but that he was as they all were, detested and detestable. The one strangeness about him struck as he turned, and Kemni had a glimpse of his eyes. They were startling, golden like a lion’s or a falcon’s.

  Then another came out from the colonnade, a figure in a white robe, with plaited hair, and Kemni forgot that there was anything odd about the lord of the holding.

  At first, for disbelief, he did not recognize her. And yet he could not mistake it. That was his cousin. That was Iry in a Retenu robe, stepping into the chariot, looking as haughty as any of them, and sparing no glance about her.

  The lord handed the reins to her with a smile amid the shadows of his beard, and spoke words that Kemni did not catch. She answered in kind, briefly. Then, as if she knew well the way of it, she turned the horses and sent them trotting briskly out.